Tourné: the classic barrel
A French classic cut — a seven-sided barrel of ≈5 cm: why it exists and how to carve it.
Tourné (French for turned) is a piece of vegetable carved into a barrel with seven even faces and flat ends, ≈5 cm long and ≈2 cm across at its widest. The cut is more for show than for practice: it gives even cooking and a restaurant look to a side dish at the cost of waste — the trimmings go into purée, soup or stock.
What for
- Potatoes (a classic side, boiled or browned in butter), carrots, turnips, zucchini, celery root.
Step by step
- Cut the vegetable into ≈5 cm pieces; halve or quarter thick ones (a large potato) lengthwise.
- Hold a piece by its ends. Use a short knife, ideally one with a curved blade (a bird's beak knife).
- In one curved stroke from the top end to the bottom, cut the first face: thin at the ends, thicker in the middle — that makes the bulge.
- Turn the piece about 1/7 of a revolution and repeat until there are seven equal faces. The ends stay flat.
Seven faces is the canon, but nobody counts at home: it matters more that all the barrels are the same size.
Tourné is cut in the hand, with the knife moving towards you, not on a board: the thumb of the cutting hand rests on the piece below the line of the cut, and the blade curves past it. The knife must be sharp and short, the motion slow and controlled.